Scene from The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), with Patric Knowles, Olivia de Havilind and Errol Flynn.

We never ran Gone With the Wind, but we ran its trailer. No doubt the St. George Theatre had run that epic in its day, but by the time we came along, what the neighborhood wanted was blood and action. A little sex was good, but not romance, and certainly not dated romance that harbored apologies for ante-bellum slavery. Still, late in the season of our crazy theater entrepreneurship, Dean insisted on ordering — and re-ordering — the trailer for GWTW, with no hope of booking the movie itself. When this “Coming Attraction” shone its red/gold light on the first few rows of the orchestra, I could usually find him camped out front row center, with a box of Sno-Caps. Max Steiner’s glorious sound-track had called us both to watch.

Trailers really are short films — there’s an art to making them. They’re hors d’oeuvres. If we couldn’t dine out on a classic, we could snack on brief glimpses of it: A spooked horse and a rickety wagon against the backdrop of burning Atlanta, Scarlett and the white portico of Tara, Rhett carrying his flailing wife to bed up an improbably long red staircase. As dated as the movie itself, the trailer was a satisfying glimpse of what our endangered movie palace had been built to contain.

That full-color trailer was crafted in 1939, arguably the golden year of movies, when stylized Deco letters swung in from the right and popped over scenes of a promised film: THE LAUGHS ARE MONSTROUS! (Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein), MIGHTIEST ADVENTURE OF ALL TIME! (The Charge of the Light Brigade), SPECTACULAR! (almost anything not a comedy), in high-contrast black and white. Even though GWTW was one of Hollywood’s first full-length feature films shot entirely in color, its trailer stuck — but for the use of color — with the classic trailer formula: an establishing shot of name actors, a two-minute-thirty-eight second sound track, and the inevitable baritone announcer, “The most memorable event in the annals of motion pictures...”

GWTW’s original trailer currently boasts 68,361 hits, while a modern adaptation stands this morning at 1, 342,336. I’ve added one to each of these numbers. Remarkable! You don’t have to rent a movie palace to visit Tara anymore.

I'm sick of TV ads before movies, and then when the trailers come, they're just clips from the movie; the art has been lost, I think...

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.

Leave a Reply.

Author

Victoria Hallerman is a poet and writer, the author of the upcoming memoir, Starts Wednesday: A Day in the Life of a Movie Palace, based on her experience as a movie palace manager of the St. George Theatre, Staten Island, 1976. As she prepares her book manuscript for publication, she shares early aspects of theater management, including the pleasures and pain of entrepreneurship. This blog is for anyone who enjoys old movie theaters, especially for those who love the palaces as they once were. And a salute to those passionate activists who continue to save and revive the old houses, including the St. George Theatre itself. This blog is updated every Wednesday, the day film always arrived to start the movie theater week.